He didn’t reply. The safari had always been pure delusion.
If he left now, she told him, he would be leaving her worse off than when he found her. She would not want to live, but she would not want to go peacefully, either. She would rage, and her raging would be pointless.
She became deeply afraid and began to cry. He made no move to comfort her. He had kept his backpack on, which made it hard to read his intentions. Did he mean to leave now, that night?
Not wanting to wake the baby, he thought twice about ringing the buzzer so early in the morning. He settled himself on the stoop. Becka’s boyfriend rescued him an hour later, coming home from a late-night recording session, and brought him up to their third-floor walk-up where the coffee was brewing and Bob Dylan was playing low on the radio. Becka’s boyfriend said, “Look who I found.” Becka turned and showed surprise. She poured him a cup of coffee, which he drank on a vintage barstool with a sparkling red vinyl seat. Her boyfriend finished his beer and excused himself to get some shut-eye. He kissed Becka on the forehead and left the room. There was a certain unorthodox domestic tranquillity here that made her father happy to have witnessed.
She placed Jack in his arms while she went to the bedroom to change out of her pajamas. When she returned she was wearing a pair of denim coveralls and a faded 7UP T-shirt. She asked him if he wanted breakfast.
“No,” he said, “no breakfast this morning.”
“Let me make you some breakfast, Dad.”
“My iPod is a wasteland,” he said. “I wondered if you could give me some new music.”
She took his iPod and walked over to the computer with it. For the tenth time he requested her new CD but she wasn’t completely satisfied with the production and didn’t want to give it to him until it was perfect. He said she was acting unconscionably toward her biggest fan. He threatened to get down on his knees. He had every intention of getting that album before leaving. She gave in finally and uploaded it. He took off the backpack—to store the iPod, she thought. But then he put the iPod in his pocket. He put his arms around her. He went over to the crib where Jack was now lying contentedly on his back. He picked the baby up and held him above his head and brought his exposed belly down to his face, breathed in his baby’s scent, and kissed his smooth skin.
The phone was ringing when he shut the door behind him.
He crossed the George Washington Bridge and an hour later turned off the primary road and walked the sidewalk past the day-care center and the library that were nestled inside the residential neighborhood. The road dipped and came to a second primary road where he turned left and the traffic picked up again. Past the gas stations he walked to the overpass and followed the shoulder down the on-ramp to the divided highway where the cars washed past with an old familiarity that quickly settled back in his ears.
He regained an eye for those locations that best served his needs for rest and renewal. He landed on a final redoubt of trees, he slept behind deserted buildings. There were occasional run-ins with unsympathetic authorities who pressed on him their provincial dogmas of safety and propriety. People did not like him on their private lawns or inside their public parks. He made no appeal to their sympathy. He simply packed up and moved on. He had proven long ago that there was no circumstance under which he could not walk if he put his mind to it.
He never returned to New York. Months passed before he could even bring himself to call home again.
Three years after leaving, he drifted into a community library in what remained of central Louisiana to use the free computers alongside the homeless and the refugees. Becka had sent him an email that had languished in his inbox for over a month. She told him of test results that confirmed with near certainty that her mother was no longer in remission. What Becka did not mention was that those tests had come in months ago and that Jane had asked Becka to wait until the end to tell him, so that he wouldn’t be tempted to return to her bedside.
He called that afternoon. He stood on the exposed side of a gas station as a heat wave issued from an incinerating and merciless sun.
“Why do you put any stock in those test results?” he asked Jane. “What are your symptoms?”
“My symptoms?” she said.
“You’ve already proven it was bogus, Jane. The whole thing was bogus.”
“It’s different this time.”
“What are you saying? That you’re dying? Who’s telling you that you’re dying?”
“Nobody needs to tell me,” she replied. “I’m dying. They tell me I’m dying because I’m dying.”
He had to inform her that she wasn’t dying. She simply wasn’t trying hard enough to overcome the nihilism of the body. The soul was inside her doing the work of angels to repulse the atheistic forces of biology and strict materialism and she needed to do her part to show God which side she was on. He suggested going for a jog or cooking a large meal.
His medication required tweaking from time to time, and then the clarity would come flooding back to him. He spoke a mile a minute. She could hardly get a word in. She asked him if he was taking his medication and he became furious. The obnoxious certainties of some people! The rigid orthodoxies of cause and effect! Whenever anyone was presented with the one true eschatology and the work of the divine, they wanted to drag those verities through the rivulets of shit dug and tended to by Western medicine. They were the drugged zombies, not him. He wasn’t crazy. He just saw things others could not see.
A week later he sat weeping in the waiting room of a psychiatrist he had seen on two other occasions. The doctor had been closing in on setting the cocktail straight again when Tim failed to return, clear-eyed once again to the bullshit and the lies. He wept because in the midst of such lucidity, he could only be confounded by what mysterious force had compelled him to return now, by the layers and layers of complexity in a war he would never comprehend.
He called home again within the month. The phantasmagoria of heaven and hell that had whipped him into a frenzy the last time he spoke to her had been replaced by the cool and measured assessment of someone observing the objective differences in a before-and-after picture. Gone was his manic pace. The soul was once again unlikely. It was despairing news. It meant that he would not see her again, not here, not in any afterlife.
He would tell her anything, of course. Yes of course he would tell her that he loved her and that the soul was vibrant and real and death only an interlude. His banana, how she had taken care of him. She had come to him in far-flung places no matter the time of day or night. Of course he would give her every reassurance, he would say anything.
But Becka answered and told him that she was already gone.
He maintained a sound mind until the end. He was vigilant about periodic checkups and disciplined with his medication. He took care of himself as best he could, eating well however possible, sleeping when his body required it, and keeping at bay to the extent his mind allowed it a grim referendum on life, and he persevered in this manner of living until his death, which took place in the far north on a day of record snowfall, during a morning blizzard.
By then he was something a passing car couldn’t resist. Gaunt and weathered, limping sturdily, he walked the shoulder of the highway like a wasted beggar moving between two ancient persecuting cities. The driver turned to look at him as he blurred past, then picked the sight back up in the rearview mirror. There he receded slowly into a terrible smallness, into nothing, not even memory.
By then he was paying attention, as Jane had taught him, and had learned to distinguish between a hundred variations of unnamed winds. He couldn’t name the twitchy burrower with the black-tipped tail that scanned an upland prairie for danger, but he knew it as well as the raspy grass with the flowering spike that left soft yellow pollen on his pant legs, and he knew it as well as the bright constellation that suddenly resolved itself out of a confusion of stars. He knew fee-bee fee-boo, fee-bee fee-boo came from a small bird with brushed gray wings and a tail as firm a
s a tongue depressor, and he knew the sharp clear whistle of set-suey, sedu-swee-swee of a scythe-beaked bird he saw often in winter, and he knew the French-inflected call of a small stately black and white bird who sang teehee tieur, teehee tieur— though he knew none of them by name.
By then he had stood on the riverbank and watched men shoot into the running water. He was startled by the echo. He watched them pull their mauled catch from the water to the parched rocks. Half the meat was missing. He had to wonder the point, if it was a matter of sport, or a supply of bullets greater than hooks and nets.
By then he had remembered the morning he returned to her hospital room to tell her he worried about the insufficiency of the final words they would say to each other. They had an awkward ceremony that made her laugh. “Good-bye, then!” she had said to him. He could not forgive himself that he had urged her to cook a meal as she was dying, so he clung to the memory of that morning.
By then he had given up everything but his need for shelter and nourishment, but there had been afternoons he spent in community libraries, reading books he would not finish and sending and receiving email. That was how he learned one day that Becka had married. She sent pictures of a small outdoor ceremony. He had never seen her look so healthy or beautiful, or so old. He was sorry that neither of her parents were in attendance. He wrote back to congratulate her. “How big Jack has gotten!” he said in response to seeing the little man in his tuxedo. He left the library with an uncertain heart, grateful that he had been spared the disappointment of anticipating an event he could not attend, but hopeful that she had done so out of mercy and not forgetfulness.
By then they wondered if he had the money for the things he brought up to the counter. He was a certain type, mute and suspect. Some contrariness kept such old men moving, as if to stop and settle would be to fall back into the human business of bickering and violence. Better for all if he was on his way. They watched him leave the store with his small bundle and stand on the other side of the road packing as if for some journey by foot, and they wondered if he knew which passes to avoid, what roads closed at the start of November, and if his permits were in order. They predicted some quarrelsome run-in or tragic end. He had a whippy sort of strength and an old rapport with his pack, which he shouldered on with a burdened grace. They watched him walk along the side of the highway, asking nothing of the passing cars and leaving town without having uttered a word.
He wanted a drink of water. It was deliciously painful, his thirst, a thought to relish quenching.
He had yet to open his eyes. He was lucid and alert as he usually was in the first few minutes after waking. He heard the wind outside, sonically layered and multidirectional, and he heard the crackle of descending snow and the slight sizzle of one flake as it caught hold of the combed bluffs accumulating against the side of the tent, shaped by the wind. His thirst persisted beautifully. What gratification would come when he finally rose and poured a cool cup into the lid of the thermos.
He made no effort to move, though, so content in the bedroll, so warm and easeful, while the wind howled madness outside and drove the snow to frenzy.
A similar feeling had overtaken him the night before. He had pitched the tent at the end of his walk and climbed exhausted inside the bag, expecting to fall quickly into a long and satisfying sleep. Despite the severity of the weather, he liked it up here almost better than any other place in the world. The bustle and tempo of people proceeding with their eventful lives could not cripple him with longing here, and it was unlikely that he would be awakened by a meddlesome authority or a group of noisy jerks. He relaxed into the warmth of the bag and felt his body, still humming with the jangle of his recent walk, wind down into a stillness that eventually made its way into his deepest interiors. The wind was just then starting to pick up, but beneath its bellowing he became aware of his heart whispering listen… listen… listen.… He heard the blood pump out of his chest and flow down his arteries to pulse faintly at his wrist and in the hollow beside his anklebone, and his breathing lifted him up and down, up and down, and he heard the calmness, like the coals of a settled fire, of his rested bones. He luxuriated in his exhaustion. The weariness was inseparable from pleasure. He half struggled to stay awake just to stretch the moment out for as long as possible.
Now it was morning. It was wrong to dawdle like this. Wake up, pack up—that was the protocol. This sort of indulgence could be dangerous.
But was there anything comparable to a languorous morning in bed, under the warm confines of a blanket, while you kept the vicious cold at bay another minute, and then stretched that one minute out to five? It was only a bedroll set on top of an inflatable pallet inside a makeshift shelter, but he didn’t open his eyes. He listened to the wind. He heard other sounds, too: a clock ticking in a warm kitchen, the coffeemaker sucking and percolating on the counter, Jane treading lightly across the floor, gathering the cups, opening the refrigerator for the milk. “Tell me where you are and I’ll pick you up,” she said from somewhere in the distance.
Five minutes gave way to ten, and ten to twenty. There was no question now that he was starting to press his luck. He had to rise and dress. He had to break down the tent. He still had to find food for the day. There were many things that awaited his command, not least the pleasurable taste of the water he promised himself as a reward for disturbing such a delicate peace.
He languished another twenty minutes. Then he absolutely insisted that he rise that instant and take care of business or else he might find himself wandering out there in the blistering snow, fighting the wind with his bare hands. But just then he realized that, at some point during his sumptuous idling, he had stopped hearing the wind. He didn’t suppose that it could have died completely and so quickly, recalling the terrible fury it was kicking up. He expected the vinyl to whip taut again in its stitching any second now, or at least to hear a few high-pitched, snow-borne whistles of the storm departing, but time marched on and there was nothing. He thought he might open his eyes to see if the silhouette of the falling snow continued to dapple the skin of the tent, but he decided not to exert himself unnecessarily. Instead he chose to do as he had done the night before: settle deep inside himself and listen to the strange, subtle operations going on inside his body. He listened for his heart to whisper its soft word. He listened for the breathing that lifted him up and down inside the bag. But listen… listen… listen was gone. His quiescent nerves gave no signals and received none. He detected nothing but an enormous, gentle stillness from the things he could name and those he couldn’t inside him, the organs and muscles, the cells and tissues. He never had to rise again, the silence informed him. Never had to walk, never had to seek out food, never had to carry around the heavy and the weary weight, and in a measure of time that may have been the smallest natural unit known to man, or that may have been and may still remain all of eternity, he realized that he was still thinking, his mind was still afire, that he had just scored if not won the whole damn thing, and that the exquisite thought of his eternal rest was how delicious that cup of water was going to taste the instant it touched his lips.
Special Thanks:
Reagan Arthur, Julie Barer, Marlena Bittner, Abbie Collins, John Daniel, Willing Davidson, Hilary Gleekman-Greenberg, M.D., Robert Howell, Daniel Kraus, Greg Lembrich, Thornton Lewis, Chris Mickus, Dave Morse, Mary Mount, Ravi Nandan, Sheila Pietrzak, Grant Rosenberg, Karen Shepard, Matt Thomas, Jayne Yaffe Kemp, the Ucross Foundation, and Elizabeth Kennedy: IALYAAT.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOSHUA FERRIS’S first novel, Then We Came to the End, won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, and it was a National Book Award Finalist. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and Tin House, among other publications. He lives in New York.
on Archive.
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